Poll: How do you learn Irish traditional tunes?

[Ceili_whistle_man]

I meant: "how did you learn most of the tunes you play?". It is not neccessarily how you learn tunes now, or how you learned your first tunes. It is about the preferred way you used for the majority of tunes you learned.

Sorry for being pedantic on the question hans, but the way you re-pose the question (as quoted above) only serves to make it even more difficult for me to give a precise answer.
One cannot give an answer to 'the preferred way you used for the majority of your tunes' because I did not learn all my tunes at the same time or all in the same way, so therefore the first tunes I learned were learned differently from the tunes I learned later, and they in turn were learned differently than how I learn now.
Written music was not used when I was growing up, I learned the same way the people that I knew learned how to play, and that was by ear, so for me it was not a 'preferred way', it was the only way.
I would like to make a little comment on the 'elitist' allegations. I was born in Northern Ireland, I play in what can be described as a softer edged Belfast style, (not so much 'huff and puff' and mad speed) I have played since childhood. Am I experienced? Yes. Elitist? No. Yet some folk here would jump all over me as elitist just for mentioning that I come from a real traditional music background and grew up with the music around me. That does not make me 'elitist'.
I was once a beginner, I was once a lesser musician, I have been through all the learning stages and after 30 odd years I am still learning new ways of playing tunes, and it will never end.
It is not about being elitist, it is all about different levels of experience in playing the music.
So no matter how it may sound to (and here again I have to use a word that will make the reverse elitist ears prick up) 'less' experienced musicians, I would suggest the more experienced ITM practioners on here are not being elitist but are trying to offer help and guidance from their greater depth of experience and knowledge.

[hans]

Thanks! Yes, it may be impossible to give a precise answer, and I am sorry if my wording of the question leaves room for interpretation.

I appreciate to hear about the journey people went through over the years, the changing ways to learn tunes, that learning can be so much different now than it was at the beginning, that in the beginning as a young kid there may have been no learning at all, simply absorption from music played by parents. I envy you people having grown up with good music all around!

Of course that alone does not make you elitist, whatever that word means to you. But if you would use your greater musical experience as an argument to proof that your opinion about something is right, like "I am right because of my vastly greater experience than yours", then I would start to question that. It is not the experience, the skills one acquired, but the attitude that this should be argument enough to make lesser experienced players adopt your opinion or follow your way.

I mean: experience should never be used as a badge. It will show from the inside, it will show in the way you play. It may show in the way you teach. On the other hand there are lousy trad music teachers who are very fine players. They just haven't acquired good teaching skills, but their success as musicians propelled them into a position where people want to learn from them, and they are trying their best.

[Mr.Gumby]

I mean: experience should never be used as a badge. It will show from the inside, it will show in the way you play. It may show in the way you teach. On the other hand there are lousy trad music teachers who are very fine players. They just haven't acquired good teaching skills, but their success as musicians propelled them into a position where people want to learn from them, and they are trying their best.

The 'great musician but lousy teacher' has become a bit of a cliché on the forums. I don't know why.

Some of the most wonderful skilled musicians I know have described to me how they learned: They were not thought at all. They listened and made their own sense of it. And it rewarded them with the keenest of ears and an innate ability to analyse and learn a tune on the spot. They had to develop that skill.

In oral transmission the great musician sets a great example, which is his way of being a great teacher. The lesser musician who talks you through every step of the way will still be the lesser teacher because of the poorer example he sets.

But are we still talking about learning tunes? To me it seems you have shifted your focus and we are now discussing learning/teaching wider music skills and I replied under that assumption.

[david_h]

I think the poll was a very succesful start for a discussion hans. There may be enough interest in the various options to take them two or three at a time along the lines of "Has xxx been more useful to you than yyy".

I hope I always get the chance to play with more experienced musicians. Even playing in the kitchen with a 'peer group' there are a range of skills and experiences and I appreciate it when 'better' players make their influence felt. Learning to cope with the effects of other people's lower skill level is a fact of life in most "community" activities. I get irritated at times with people who are not doing so well and seem to want to join in without putting in the effort - that includes at 'beginners' sessions. Better players saying the same about 'their' sessions or 'the music' as a whole seems fair to me, not elitist. I wonder how many slow sessions were set up with a dual purpose - to help people improve and as a 'buffer zone' around another session with more experienced players.

In my experience snobs don't like having challenging questions asked about what they are snobbish about. If I can't think of a question then I am not up to the challenge and I keep quiet.

[fiddlerwill]

I spent decades in learning environments in a number of traditional arts, studying in hundreds of different places and the number of different teachers and teaching methods was/is huge! !! I learnt a hell of a lot about my art[s] and teaching methods. Over time I too eventually became a teacher, Not as a conscious choice , it just happened, and Im pleased to say I have a reputation as a good teacher.
Over years of teaching I found some constants. ; Not everyone picks up things at the same pace or with the same teaching methods and if, as a responsible teacher, I wish to aid the students in their journey, I feel obliged to tailor my methods to the individual. That does not mean giving them what they want, or in ways that they think will work for them, after all they are the learners and actually , really, dont have a clue.
What I found was that the fundamentals are the most important things and all the little tricky bits can only develop with good basics. That all the fancy stuff is completely useless without these basics.
I try not to talk too much, but demonstrate, repeatedly slowly and carefully and dont go faster than the slowest student can manage. More advanced students can then find this Irksome, but in reality there *is* only the basics. Everything else is really the basics being performed better and in more detail.

[Ceili_whistle_man]

But if you would use your greater musical experience as an argument to proof that your opinion about something is right, like "I am right because of my vastly greater experience than yours", then I would start to question that.

I'm not sure if you are replying in general terms to everyone or if you are answering me directly hans, but I'll respond anyway. Personally, I wouldn't dream of using terminology like 'greater musical experience as an argument to proof that your opinion about something is right' or 'I am right because.' If I met anyone talking like that (I have more experience than you so I am right) I would tell them to pull their head out of their hole and to effoff. Experience is just that, experience, it is not the game breaking 'proof' that an opinion is right in any discussion. Perhaps you have met people like that?

Sorry for going off topic a bit....

Mr.Gumby wrote; In oral transmission the great musician sets a great example, which is his way of being a great teacher. The lesser musician who talks you through every step of the way will still be the lesser teacher because of the poorer example he sets.

I'm not sure if I would agree entirely with that Mr.Gumby, I can see what you mean, but still, I don't think lesser musician equals lesser teacher. I know a fantastic whistle player who has difficulty teaching because she can't put it all into words. I love her playing, and I find I hear little things she does when playing that I don't do, I get more from hearing her play than I ever would in one of her classes. I also know a few middle of the road players who are very good teachers, great at explaining ornamentation and the 'mysteries' of how to play ITM so that it sounds right.

[Mr.Gumby]

I'm not sure if I would agree entirely with that Mr.Gumby, I can see what you mean, but still, I don't think lesser musician equals lesser teacher. I know a fantastic whistle player who has difficulty teaching because she can't put it all into words. I love her playing, and I find I hear little things she does when playing that I don't do, I get more from hearing her play than I ever would in one of her classes. I also know a few middle of the road players who are very good teachers, great at explaining ornamentation and the 'mysteries' of how to play ITM so that it sounds right.

That's more than fair enough. Now we've left learning tunes and are heading into more general teaching of (traditional) music I probably have to admit to having a bias towards a teaching style that encourages the student to work a few things out for themselves and maybe not verbalise all things into great detail. And I have that bias because I continuously see it work so well in practice and that colours my perception.

I think in general a student will have to be ready. From my own learning experience (I received a minimal amount of teaching) that things being explained in detail well doesn't mean they will 'take'. I noticed things finding a place in my playing anything up to twenty years after they were explained and then only after I heard them used in a way that took my fancy. Which takes us back to the importance of learning by ear and absorption again.

[fiddlerwill]

That's more than fair enough. Now we've left learning tunes and are heading into more general teaching of (traditional) music I probably have to admit to having a bias towards a teaching style that encourages the student to work a few things out for themselves and maybe not verbalise all things into great detail. And I have that bias because I continuously see it work so well in practice and that colours my perception.

Absolutely, I want to stress this point because it runs contrary to a typical western tradition of intellectualism and explanation. Which I hasten to add can be highly productive in some fields. But This path is not the only way. Some skills can be much better taught in a more holistic manner.
The potential trouble with this holistic approach is the modern western mindset can find it hard to grasp at first. Its alien, and people can crave teaching that panders to what they are used to, and in fact many teachers feel obliged to provide this to earn their living,. BUT The old ways do have several advantages that are not immediately apparent to the goal orientated western mind that looks for levels of success, clearly measurable , quantifiable and achievable goals, A process which breaks the learning process into sections. We know that the older methods, though thy appear different and strange, work.
It might not be what you are used to, but persevere. It is a tried and tested proven approach that though might feel unstructured it actually has a macro-structure that cant necessarily be seen from within the learning process.

[Ceili_whistle_man]

Mr.Gumby wrote;

I probably have to admit to having a bias towards a teaching style that encourages the student to work a few things out for themselves

Yep, I lean a bit that way myself.

[sbfluter]

I got started with notation. I was given a copy of the book of sheet music my session used to use back in the day when they used a book of sheet music. (It's a big long story, and they no longer use the sheet music.) I also learned a lot of tunes that they didn't play. Since they never played them, eventually I forgot most of them.

Every now and then, someone will start a tune that sounds kind of familiar. I will start to play along. I have no idea how I know the tune. Sometimes I will remember that I tried to learn it from the notation a long time ago.

Mostly now I will learn a tune during the tune learning portion of the session or I'll hear something on a recording and try to learn it from there. Neither of these works out all that terribly well for me since the tune-learning tunes tend to be heavily weighted toward tunes easy to play on the fiddle and harder to play on the flute. And recordings are really problematic because they always jazz up the tunes too much, play them in the "wrong" keys, or else I'm attracted by pretty or unusual tunes nobody would want to play in a session (The Sunset--a slow reel, for example.)

Sometimes I will learn a tune during the session. Little by little I'll get more and more of the pieces. After a few months, maybe I'm playing most of it. Sometimes it helps to refer to the notation to get those last little bits that elude me.

[dsmootz]

I'm a solid #4 at the moment. I have years of classical music training behind me (including a minor on my university degree), and a small fraction of that involved learning by ear, but it was a small enough fraction that I was able to "cram" for it, and more or less forget how to do it afterwards. A year ago, an obsession with Irish music took root, and reading here and over at thesession, I got the message loud and clear that I would need to get myself weaned off of the dots to pick up on the ITM dialect. I'm happy to say that, when I started out a year ago, I was doing about 10% of my learning by ear, and now it's about 90% (as well as being able to spot youtube vids by classical players who haven't done their homework - I couldn't hear the difference in rhythms a year ago). I'm using the dots as reminders, or to clarify the occasional tricky phrase. The majority of my learning is done from recordings, which are a mix of commercial CDs and my own field recordings. An important distinction, though, is that I'm using recordings to learn HOW to learn by ear - a few years down the road, I hope to learn most of my tunes from other players, after hearing them a couple of times through.

Fortunately for me, a "learning session" recently split off of a local session, where we take 30 minutes or more to go over single tune, phrase by phrase, until everyone more or less has it, so I'm getting some real-time practice at that. I'm in the middle of making the effort that Ben has referred to, and I have to say that from this perspective, it is far from small, even with the limited experience I already have. "Small" is relative, of course, and if you're looking at things from the perspective of a musician's entire lifetime, I suppose I could see where it might be an apt term.

[pancelticpiper]

I'm coming in quite late to this party and WOWZA 13 pages of discussion!

I selected #6 because I (perhaps wrongly) interpreted the choices which included "reading notation" to mean reading from somebody else's notation, which I rarely do.

What I do is this: I go down to the session, record tunes I want to learn, then at home write them out.

Sometimes the recording quality is so poor that I can only get parts of the tune. In these cases I go to thesession and do a search with the fragments I have. Usually the version on thesession is close enough to our session version to be of use to flesh out the fragments I have. One bonus is getting to see all the various titles the tune is known by.

The poor recording quality is the reason I don't just play along with the session recording. It's too annoying, all the background noise.

I agree with the post umpteen pages ago that brings up the issue that the versions heard on commercial recordings are often odd, probably deliberately so. Versions found on CDs and found written in books are almost never the way our session plays them.

It's nice when one finds a CD that has normal session versions of tunes, but they seem to be the exception.

I suppose the underlying issue is WHY we're learning a particular tune. Since I'm learning it to play at our session I don't give a rat's @$$ how somebody played it on such-and-such CD or YouTube or how it appears in so-and-so's collection.

[StevieJ]

It's nice when one finds a CD that has normal session versions of tunes, but they seem to be the exception.

I think that's entirely normal - I mean that they would be the exception. One of the delights of recordings - for me, at this stage of the game - is discovering new (to me) settings of familiar tunes. And I'm not talking about recent CDs, where it may be the case that artists seem to feel that they need different (I wouldn't say "wacky") settings to differentiate their offering / product from every other setting available on record.

I'm thinking of recordings of older players, who learned much of their repertoire before the standardizing trends that we are all subject today really took hold: printed collections (and yes I know that pockets of older players learned tunes straight out of O'Neill's, but still); commercial recordings (and yes I know many of the older players slavishly imitated Coleman and co., but still); the internet; and indeed pub sessions themselves, perhaps the biggest standardizing influence of all.

If we are going to play in different sessions, and esp. if we are going to travel, we need a good knowledge of the standardized canon. But to have anything interesting to contribute, at some point we need to start looking further afield, wouldn't you agree?

[talasiga]

A propos the well put fiddlerwill post

Mr.Gumby wrote;

I probably have to admit to having a bias towards a teaching style that encourages the student to work a few things out for themselves

Yep, I lean a bit that way myself.

there are some elements here that are common with this other teacher from a different tradition, but still an oral/aural one:

excerpt from article by Lyon Leifer

Devendra Murdeshwar's teaching methods are demanding, effective and designed to promotethe development of creative musicians. Guruji always encourages the student to find his or her own way in the music, refusing to allow the student to simply memorize passages, long or short. Instead, he continues to provide inspired examples of each type of playing, and encourages one to catch on through practicing hard and "taxing the brain" (as he likes to say). So one must strive to remember in practice at home what he has shown in the lesson. In this method, if you can't remember exactly what you have been shown, you must try to create something as close as possible to what you remember. This forces you to grasp the "structuring principle" of the different types of improvization you are shown. Another facet of his teaching includes the personal inculcation of music history and theory in the course of expansive informal discussion. The result of all this devoted teaching is that he has produced a number of highly capable and creative players whose recitals also hold the interest of the audience.

[pancelticpiper]

...grasp the "structuring principle" of the different types of improvization you are shown.

Yes that's how I was taught Irish music initially, by a guy who wanted me to understand how Irish jigs and reels are assembled on the fly from traditional motifs.

He didn't word it that way, but that's what he was teaching. "Better to learn ten ways of playing one tune than to learn ten tunes" is how he put it.